


tracklist

by inkspl0tches



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, Thanks Adele
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-28
Updated: 2015-11-28
Packaged: 2018-05-03 18:02:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,197
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5301368
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkspl0tches/pseuds/inkspl0tches
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>he’d give her the moon if she wanted, but he could hardly offer complete and total salvation.</p>
            </blockquote>





	tracklist

**Author's Note:**

> the working title for this was: non-chronological scenes from a separation (feat. adele)  
> 

 

 

_**1- i've forgotten how it felt before the world fell at our feet** _

he calls her. it feels pathetic and dramatic and, oh, so 80s movie cliché. rain drums on the phone booth, and he is not drunk, not even a little bit.

it is not like the last time he’d called at midnight and apologized and apologized again (he was a terrible husband, terrible partner, terrible brother, terrible father, he was terrible, unforgivable, he knew why she’d left, it was okay. he was nearly sober and completely sincere when he told her he understood) until she couldn’t say anything but “no, no, no,” and he’d lost the thread of her voice in the violence of her tears.

this is different, though. this time he’d merely been wandering, hands in pockets, down a side street in adam’s morgan after waiting on a no-show contact in dupont circle. his underground network of conspiracy theorists and informants seems to have shrunken and deflated. everything takes on a particularly absurd and transparent sheen when the apocalypse itself stands you up for a date, he knows.  

even his past, the one that counted, the one with scully, seems haphazard and extrinsic with the final catastrophic scene cut from the script. it was as if they’d been weighing everything against the significance of armageddon, waiting for some violent resolution to give meaning to every scar. it had never come, their salvation via destruction, and with nothing balance out the other side the see-saw of their lives had plummeted to earth, cracked when it hit the ground. but maybe that was just him, maybe that was why she’d left.

still, the phone booth tilting on the sidewalk had filled him with something like homesickness for her voice, for the familiar curve of her spine under his hand and the staccato of her heels against the dc streets. it takes him a moment to remember her new phone number, and it starts to rain as it rings, tinny and impersonal in his ear.

“hello?”

“it’s me,” he says after a moment.  it feels like a scene from that john cusack movie, with the rain against the glass and his heart in his throat. i gave her my heart and she gave me a pen. that was the line wasn’t it? except scully hadn’t given him anything when she left, not even divorce papers so they could make a clean break.

“it’s you,” she repeats and he hopes the softness in her voice is real and not an imagined byproduct of how much he misses her.

he is, for several seconds, at a total loss for what to say. an apology bubbles in his throat again, but the memory of her tears through the phone, blurred and serrated at the edges, catches in his mind and he swallows the words. i’m sorry i broke your heart, i’m sorry i don’t know how to fix anything anymore. “do you remember texas, scully?” he says instead, suddenly, surprising himself.

“vampires or werewolves?” and this time he knows the smile in her voice is real.

“werewolves,” he tells her, but he hadn’t had either in mind. he was remembering the texas of 2002, where she’d called her mother from a gas station with her hair dyed ash blond, told her she was safe, she was with him, and she couldn’t come home. he was remembering the texas of 2002 where he’d held her in a phone booth while she’d cried, and her tears had left tracks in the dust on her cheeks.

“of course i remember,” she is saying now, in 2015, and she is remembering a different texas entirely. “is that why you called?”

“i just wanted to hear your voice,” he coughs. “what do you remember?”

“i remember that song wouldn’t stop playing on the radio.”

“which one?” he asks.

“oh, i don’t remember the name now.”

“c’mon, scully.”

“to find a dream and a life of their own,” she half-hums, muttering. he used to be able to make her sing, loud and off-key in their kitchen on saturday evenings. “a place in the clouds...foundation of stone...whatever that one is. it played all the time, on every station. we knew all the words.”

he laughs, “i remember. i just wanted to hear you sing it.”

a cool automatic voice cuts into her laughter on the other end of the line and informs him he needs to put in more quarters if he’d like to continue his call.  

“where are you, mulder?” she asks when he feeds it more coins. texas, he thinks, with you. keep talking, scully.

“doesn’t matter. what happened after that? after the song in the car, what did we do?”

“well,” she begins again, and the rain has slowed to a steady thrum outside, keeping rhythm with her voice. he stacks his quarters by the receiver, estimates he’s got another hour or so with her. that was fine, that was long enough, that was better than nothing. he leans back and lets her tell him about the world before it didn’t end. if he closes his eyes, he can almost see it.

 

_**2 - we’ve gotta let go of all of our ghosts**_

he remembers the day he met her. the date, the time, the way her hair brushed her shoulders and the light from the projector shifted the color of her eyes. he’s almost certain all the details are real, not re-imagined and refocused to fit his state of mind. they say hindsight is 20/20, but they never mention if it wears rose-colored glasses.

he wants to call her to fact check. it’s early march, the 6th to be completely precise, and the air is still cool through the kitchen window. he wonders if she remembers why today means something, if it means anything anymore.

he wants to text her “twenty-two years,” but he doesn’t know if she’ll get it. there was a time when he never had to second-guess her comprehension. they could speak in half-sentences, make elaborate plans with extended glances, and there was always a particular rhythm, an understanding to their silence. now he just asks if she has plans tonight and pretends the question doesn’t make him nervous.

“i do, actually,” is her quick reply. he swallows, probably dinner with her mother.

“got a date?” he responds after a few moments of staring at his hands at the kitchen table they’d picked out together. it had been at a garage sale in howard county, and she’d been fascinated and a little perturbed by the stories of someone else’s life etched into the dents in the worn wood. he assured her they’d write stories of their own and they had, they had.

“yes,” is all she says back and for one, exquisite second, he wants to die.

grow up, mulder, her voice says in his head as he tosses his phone across the room. he remembers the pursed pout of her lips as she’d watched him flip through slides of raised spots on the backs of teenagers. he tries to forget the way she’d smiled, the way she’d challenged einstein and changed his world.

grow up, he thinks again, looking at the shattered screen of his phone on the kitchen tiles. he tries not to remember the way she’d once teased him after he’d coerced her into watching a late night showing of peter pan. _my lost boy_ , she’d murmured when he was seconds away from sleep on her shoulder. _what am i going to do with you?_

lost boys didn’t grow up, he thinks now. she knew that when she let herself love him. he knew that when he let her leave. he slams his fist against the ugly, old, worn, theirs table, but it doesn’t make a scratch. he tries to let her go.

 

_**3 - let me fall into your gravity** _

it’s fall and the air is crisp and new and in sharp contrast with the graceful death that surrounds it. it is fall and everything is ending exquisitely, in reds and golds and pinks. it is fall when she comes home.

“i miss you,” she’d told him quietly in the summer, before she’d ever left. he’d wanted to ask how she could miss him when he was right there, when they shared a bed and a home and coffee in the mornings. he’d wanted to ask how she could miss him when he’d never left. but she’d stepped back when he’d reached to touch her, and he’d felt the space between them stretch and multiply (it was inches, god, it was miles) until it was significant enough to be marked on roadmaps. she’d shaken her head, her eyes going pale and numb. “never mind,” she’d said in a tight, medical little voice. it was the one that was good for autopsies and lost causes. suddenly, he’d missed her too.

“i miss you,” she’d told him again in winter, over the phone, when they talked late into the night like it was 1997, but she still refused to see him after work. he’d seen her five hours ago. that wasn’t what she’d meant. he’d heard her sniff, like maybe she was going to cry. he hadn’t known what to say except “come home, please,” but he couldn’t say that, she didn’t want him to say that. she’d cried quietly, like she was trying to suppress something sharp and fragile and too huge to rationalize this late at night, like if she could break it into pieces she could chalk it up to the sad movie on tv. he’d bit his lip and pressed his fingers to his eyes and pretended to be asleep.

“i missed you,” she says now, her lips against his neck in the dusky light of their bedroom. “god, i missed you so much.”

the verb tense is not lost on him, and when they pull away to look at each other with matching smiles, it feels like spring, like everything is beginning again.

 

 

_**4 - my god, this reminds me** _

he argues with her on highways and in hallways, in basement offices and backroad diners. “i have a theory,” he’ll say, leaning against the edge of the desk and she’ll say, “just one?” and the way they smile will be twenty-five years of partnerships and strangers meeting for the first time all rolled into one.

it’s strange to be back. skinner scolds them like he hasn’t seen their home together or held their son. people whisper about spooky mulder. they corner monsters in their flashlight beams. they get lost in forests and fields. they’re too old to do this, they do it anyways. their reputations precede them and sometimes, when he touches the small of her back she forgets what year it is altogether.

ultimately the lines between novelty and nostalgia blur together until there is barely a break between past and present. she’s special agent dana scully and she’s been assigned to work with him, and no one thought to warn her she might love him a little, when everything's said and done.  

“scully,” he says, in california, breathless and overeager as he tugs open the door to the passenger side of the rental car. they’re chasing lights in the sky again.

he’s the man she lived with for a decade, he’s her husband, he’s the father of her child, and he’s a stranger. a stranger with a badge and a gun and a reputation and his heart on his sleeve and eyes that will always be older than he is. he isn’t alone, she doesn’t recognize herself either. or rather, she recognizes herself all too well. she is wide eyed and tightlipped and precocious and in awe of him all over again. she lets him tug her towards some great unknown.

“you’ve gotta see this,” he tells her and she feels like she’s rewinding a tape, playing things again.

they watch the sky shoulder to shoulder. the light stretches across the l.a. smog like the never-ending tail of a comet. when they turn to each other, awestruck and somewhat giddy, they toss words like “extraterrestrial” and “military technology” back and forth like the world’s oldest game of catch. when it goes quiet he looks back to where the lights had been minutes ago. she studies his profile for a long time, tries to remedy deja vu with a scientist’s understanding of the phenomenon.

“what is it?” he asks, eventually, when he notices her looking. “you’re staring at me, agent scully.”

“nothing,” she says, smiling like she has a secret. “you just reminded me of someone is all.”

 

_**5 - every story has its scars** _

there wasn’t anyone else, in the end.  

when the doctor had sat her down and gently told her she had terminal cancer she’d blinked once, twice, three times and excused herself to call her partner. it hadn’t been real until he knew, hadn’t been tangible until he’d held her in a hallway like he could will the cancer out of her if she would just be still.

it’s like that, when her mother dies. she calls him before she calls charlie, before she sees bill, because although she has brothers that love her and coworkers that would be there for her, there isn’t anyone else, not really. she calls him to make it real, to hold her hand and watch the heart monitor flatline with her. he holds her in a hospital hallway again, whispering things she doesn’t deserve to hear.

it’s not fair, she doesn’t think, for her to love him this much and have left him. but her faith in the reality of pure and total justice had died somewhere along with melissa, so she turns her face to his chest and lets herself need him. just for a moment, she tells herself. just for right now.

at the funeral they play the same hymns she’s heard a hundred times, they both have. they’ve seen more death together than she can catalogue chronologically. it all fades into a blur of black clothes, and his hand in hers. this time the ocean is their graveyard. she stares out at a still, black sea.

“i’m so sorry, scully,” he says, his voice cracking, and she remembers then that he’d lost her mother, too.

“you couldn’t have saved her, mulder,” she whispers, and she means a hundred different people. her mother and his, her sister and his, her daughter and a million other little girls who she knows he still sees, mutilated and muffled in his nightmares. “it’s alright.”

he drops her hand to wrap his arm around her waist and she turns into him, ever so slightly, like she’s cosmically inclined. there are people all around them, a shifting and murmuring storm-darkened wave. she curls closer, gripping the edge of his jacket and closing her eyes. “make it go away,” she wants to say, demand that he silence the waves and the whispers and still the throbbing, aching place below her collarbone, but she can’t ask him that.

he’d give her the moon if she wanted, but he could hardly offer complete and total salvation.

he presses a kiss to her hair and she breathes a silent thank you into his chest. it was too big a task to ask him to change the world for her. she settles for letting him remedy this one instead.

 

_**6 - if i'm not the one for you why have we been through what we have been through** _

they had hundreds, maybe thousands of stories to tell. what they didn’t have in eloquence they could make up for in emotion. they could contest brothers grimm for most frightening monsters, most epic love story. there would be morals, too, because fairy tales always had those. he thinks maybe the only thing they’re missing now is a happy ending, and an audience.

after william was born, he’d thought they’d have years to recount their past to him. at least until he got too old for bedtime stories, or stopped believing them.

“your mom,” he’d told him once, beginning a story on what would turn out to be the only night he’d have the chance, but he hadn’t known that yet, “is the bravest person i have ever met, and i once met mickey mantle.”

william, who was twenty-seven hours old, hadn’t stirred. mulder had tilted his head to look at him, and he could have sworn the baby was raising his right eyebrow.

“yeah,” he’d said, grinning. “she wouldn’t believe me either, but it’s true. did you know she once shot me?”

“what’s this you’re telling our child about, mulder?” she -- and it was her, the bravest person he’d ever met, all sleepy-eyed and soft edges. the courage is something she wears on her sleeve instead of her heart -- had asked, smiling down at him from behind the couch.

“a fairy-tale,” he’d told her.

“no you’re not,” she’d said. “you’re telling him about us.”

“same thing.”

she’d snorted a little, coming around the couch to put a condescending, but gentle hand on his head. “not entirely.”

she’d turned out to be right, and he thinks about calling her now to congratulate her for her foresight. it could have gone entirely differently. it could have gone like this:

william would have wanted to know how things work, how hearts beat and scully would have known. she’d have told him about arteries and circulation and he’d have stared at her with big eyes. mulder would have leaned against the doorway of will’s bedroom and understood exactly how it felt to be in awe of dana scully.

he would have asked “why is the sky so blue?” and scully would’ve launched into an explanation of reflection of light as mulder said “because a lake monster spit on it and turned it that color.” william would look between them and laugh, delighted, and that would have been their son. skinned knees and knotted hair, a mis-matched amalgam of science and mythology. he’d have told his preschool teachers about einstein and bigfoot. he would have carried a magnifying glass in his back pocket and been brilliant.

they could have sat at the edge of his bed and told him watered down tales about flukemen and aliens in antarctica. they would have always ended with “and they lived happily ever after,” and it would have been true.

that isn’t how it happened, though.

now, he sifts through files and photos in their cold house. boxes full of papers and evidence spill out of his office and into the living room, and they seem to be full of proof only of their shared existence, his and scully’s. a snapshot from a case in minnesota when he thought he was capturing the monster they were after, but wound up with a candid of his partner instead. she is pale and stubborn against the dark background, but her lips are curved up in a smile. this is their entire lives, in folders and photographs, in vials of dna and discarded motel keys. he thinks about trying to rearrange it all in order, create something linear and smooth that he could show her later and say, “this is our life. why did you leave?”

but there isn’t a point. there is no happily ever ending or epilogue. he wonders if maybe it was worthless, all of it. after all, no one would want to read a story with the last pages ripped out.

but maybe that’s not it at all, he thinks as he tacks the photo of her above his desk, maybe their story isn’t poorly written, a victim of shoddy manufacturing. maybe it just isn’t over.  

 

_**7 - consider this my apology; i know it's years in advance** _

she tells him, after his mother dies and his sister writes to them from beyond her adolescent grave, that she’s not going to leave him. she means it as an argument, after he’d waved her out of his motel room, claiming she needed her rest, that she hated how he slept with the tv on when they were on the road. she’d crossed her arms and planted her feet and told him not to be ridiculous, she wasn’t going anywhere.

“don’t make promises you can’t keep, scully.” his voice is soft, almost teasing but his smile is tired. she blinks, and he brushes his fingers across her cheek as some sort of apology. she catches his hand and presses a kiss to his palm, closes his fingers over it in some bittersweet symbol that she wants him to remember it later. she’s not sure when.

he falls asleep on her shoulder, and she turns her words over in her mouth like hard candy, says them again, aloud, in the stillness of the room just because she can. _i’m not going anywhere, mulder_. she does not take them back.

 

 

_**8 - maybe we're already defeated** _

she wishes he wouldn’t watch her do this, but he seems unable to do anything else. for all the times she’s said “look at me, mulder” (and she’s said it a hundred different times, in a hundred different ways), she would take them all back if he would just turn his hollow stare somewhere else while she packed her things.

it’s overcast, which seems fitting, because they’ve spent the last two years shrouded in their own, personal shadow.  he moves toward her in the grey light of their bedroom, and she puts out a hand to stop him. if he falls apart now, she’ll fall with him, like she always has. he freezes across the room, raises a hand helplessly and says nothing at all.

“this is hard for me, too,” she wants to cry, but she can’t decide if she’d rather whisper it or let it rip through her like a sob, so she bites her lip instead, mentally adds herself onto the list of people who’ve broken his heart. she will be awarded no medals for bravery here.

as she zips her suitcase she thinks it would be easier if she could bring herself to hate him. if she could turn to him calmly, touch his arm and tell him she didn’t love him anymore. she’s been a lot of things (selfish, she spits at herself now, you’re fucking selfish) but never a liar, and never to him. he deserves a clean break, and she can’t even give him that.

“i’ll call,” she promises by the stairs.

“okay,” he says. she can see in his eyes that he doesn’t believe her.

he was the collateral damage of her own salvation. she would have followed him anywhere, across the world, through forests and alleyways, but he can’t even follow her to the front door.

they’d fought monsters and endless insidious forces together. he’d had her back, read her mind, shouldered half the battle while she reloaded her gun. she’s been fighting by herself for a long time now.

she can’t save both of them anymore.

 

_**9 - i know i'm not the only one who regrets the things they've done** _

she cuts her hair two weeks after she leaves him. it had been easy, after the second time with pfaster, with her hair sharp and sliding across her chin, to pretend the thought of shampoo, conditioner, wash, rinse, repeat didn’t make her want to scream. it was hard to ignore the way her hands sometimes shook in the shower, how she avoided nail salons for six months and couldn’t stand lit candles in the house, but she could wash her chopped hair in forty-five seconds flat, so she managed.

it had been different, with mulder, and she’d let her hair grow long and soft around her shoulders. he’d liked to push it out of her eyes, make jokes about rapunzel, which hadn’t made washing it any easier.

she used to drop shampoo bottles in the shower, when she thought too long about what she was doing, when she could swear she could hear pfaster asking her if she used color-treated conditioner. plastic against porcelain has a particular sound, and somehow he could always hear her over the pounding water. there were days when his voice outside the bathroom, his occasional quiet presence on the other side of the shower curtain were the only way she could refocus her attention, finish her hair on autopilot while he talked quietly to her about nothing. it was rare that she’d let him help her rinse the soap out of her hair because her precise, steady post-mortem surgeon’s hands shook too much, but it happened. they never talked much about afterwards.

they lived in a museum of past horrors, a curio collection of traumas that they’d accumulated and peppered throughout their lives. she could point to each one as though conducting a tour: that one is from the time i was abducted by the government. that one is from the serial killer who wanted to bathe me after he killed me, and if you’ll look this way, folks, you’ll see the little thing i picked up from having both my children ripped away from me!

she had her hair, and her penchant for flashbacks in the children’s ward of the hospital; her aversion to white fluorescent lights and drills. he had his nightmares and his paranoia, his flat out refusal to be around needles. his near obsessive compulsive need to know where she is at all times. the stacked snow in winter reminded them both of antarctica. they pooled their damages, mixed them together and confused them with each others, but he knew how to talk her through a shower, and she knew how to hold his hand, make him look at her when nightmares painted everything in shades of doubt and hysteria. they were broken, but they tried.

so when she leaves him, she cuts her hair. it is only after a record two panic attacks in her new apartment bathroom that she realizes she may have overestimated herself. she will not call him, will not admit she needs him, so she cuts it off.

the hairdresser swivels her towards the mirror, says she looks fantastic. scully conducts a staring contest with her own reflection. it hasn’t been shoulder length in a long time, not since william, not since before she’d dyed it every shade of the rainbow in gas station bathrooms. for a split second she thinks: he won’t recognize me, and she’s not sure who she means.

later, a whole flipbook of seasons and regrets later, she stands toe-to-toe with mulder in yet another hallway. she rakes her fingers nervously through her hair, thinks about the adolescent boy two rooms down who has never really known her, thinks about the round-cheeked baby who would pull her hair and smile, smile, smile. she looks up at her partner (because that’s the best word for him, these days) who is shifting uncomfortably, hands in his pockets. she wants to touch him, but she’s not sure he’d let her.

the door down the hall opens and a suit-clad man beckons them forward. they look at each other, as if for approval, or understanding or sympathy or some watercolor mix of all three. she wonders if her fear registers on her face, etched into her features like cracks in porcelain. she thinks something must show, or else he simply knows her too well after all, because mulder’s eyes soften when they meet hers.

she opens her mouth to say something -- that’s their son in that room, and, god, what if he hates her? -- but she can’t seem to let sound tumble past her lips. her hand moves to her hair again and she wonders when she developed this particular nervous habit. his hand catches hers mid-air, lowers it gently to her side but does not let go. instinctively, she squeezes his fingers and holds on.  his free hand tucks her hair behind her ear without hesitance, with no stutter-step to indicate he’d ever stopped touching her. she wonders if he is thinking of calling her rapunzel, wonders if he might hate her too.

“you look terrific,” he says, his hand lingering just a moment too long by her cheek and his voice low enough that only she can hear. “let’s go meet our son.”  

 

_**10 - it matters how this ends** _

she feels phantasmal and transparent. she is haunting ground where she no longer belongs. myth will tell her she is tethered here by some unfinished business, by some inextinguishable love. she steps carefully into their living room, her sense of unreality heightened by the quiet and the moonlight falling in parallel lines across the floor. it’s been this way for months. she’s felt cold, illusory, dead. she hasn’t existed since june.

mulder is asleep on the couch. it’s been so long since she’s watched him sleep, and the way he’s stretched out on their couch is so familiar, so reminiscent of clandestine moments in his warm apartment, of falling asleep to black and white movies on his blurry tv, that she presses her lips to her mouth to keep from crying. it hurts more than anything else, somehow, that he’s back on the couch again. she’d once told him they were going in an endless line, but she’d lied. they were going in hypnotic, unending circles.

she’s going to leave him. soon, maybe tomorrow. she can’t be here.

she trails her fingers down his cheek and almost hopes it won’t wake him. she’s not sure what she’s doing down here in the first place. it’s been weeks since he fell asleep in their bed with her, longer since she woke up next to him in the mornings.  

“hey,” she says softly when he opens his eyes.

“scully?” he looks confused, maybe a touch afraid. she wonders when he started being surprised to see her in her own home. “what’s wrong?”

“nothing,” she tells him, looks down at the floor. “i was cold.”

she thinks, for a moment, for several, that he may toss her a blanket and go back to sleep. she thinks if he does she may not leave. she may not do anything but stand frozen in their living room and wonder when the fuck they managed to turn all the broken, angry, jagged parts of themselves outwards and towards each other. she thinks if he pushes her away now she may finally wink out of existence entirely, now you see me, now you don’t.

instead he smiles and tugs her hand until she’s curled between him and the couch cushions, and she should have known, she should have known it would be his softness that would break her in the end. her cheek is to his chest and her leg is draped over his. he brushes hair out of her face with the hand that isn’t wrapped around her waist, and he’s as gentle as he’s always been. she curls her fist into his t-shirt, thinks he’s always touched her like he may frighten her away, and hates herself for proving him right.  

“better?” he whispers, and the hand at her waist moves up and under the soft flannel of her pajama shirt to run up and down her back. they used to lay like this on sunday mornings.

she bites her lip, nods mutely against him. “better,” she says after a moment. she wants that so badly to be true. she swipes at her cheek suddenly, covering up evidence before she gives herself away.

“scully,” he starts, quiet, and she can feel his voice through the vibrations in his chest. “is everything okay?”

oh, god. she chokes on a sob, almost lays it all bare before him right there. almost hesitates a moment too long, almost lets him break her apart like a house of cards, pieces of her lost to the wind.

“i’m fine, mulder,” she says, fights to keep her voice steady. some small, desperate, naive part of her screams that she’s given herself away anyways. idiot, it says, he’ll know like he always does. he’ll understand without her having to say it at all.

he presses a kiss to her forehead instead. “okay,” he says, content.

something to the left of her sternum irrevocably shatters. she bites her lip to keep from crying out.

it’s not fair to lay the responsibility on him, to expect him to know her inside out.

but he used to.

he used to have her memorized backwards and forwards, like the back of his hand and a million other cliches that somehow fell into place with them perfectly. he doesn’t anymore, and it breaks her fucking heart to watch their dysfunction play out so brilliantly while she presses herself closer to him and pretends she isn't terrified to live without him.

he draws slow, intricate shapes against her skin until she regulates her breathing to feign sleep. he can’t tell the difference. when his heartbeat slows to an even rhythm against her ear she tells him she loves him, tells him she can’t watch this happen to them, tells him she needs him but she has to leave, tells him a hundred things she’d never say when he was awake. he wouldn’t hear her anyway.

“goodnight, mulder,” she says, finally. she squeezes her eyes shut and pulls him closer to her, as though the edge of the couch knows the charm of gravity, and would somehow steal him from her before she was ready to let go.

she dreams about them like they used to be and sleeps with her hand in his.

 

**_11 - you're the right kind of madness_ **

they go out for lunch like they used to, wandering familiar streets, bickering over directions to old haunts. a waitress at their most frequent spot from years ago recognizes them immediately, almost cries when she notices scully’s wedding ring.

today she’d let him pay for sandwiches from a street vendor, and it is warm enough already for them to walk back to work. the air promises a cherry blossom spring, and she recounts the way she’d shut down an agent who she’d caught spreading rumors about “the spookies in the basement.”

mulder laughs, tells her she can’t afford to get canned for fighting in the workplace on their second month back on the job. she scrunches her nose, feels defensive of her defensiveness and mutters, “it trivializes our whole lives, mulder, when they do that.”  

“scully,” he says, stopping her on the sidewalk. his voice is genuine, but she can tell he isn’t done teasing. “i didn’t realize you took your role as the official mrs. spooky so seriously.”

she snorts. “shut up, mulder. mrs. spooky was not in the original job description.”

“do you mind that?”

she doesn’t, she thinks maybe she used to, but not anymore. she shrugs instead, and he looks at her with a wicked, juvenile glint in his eye.

“say it, scully.” his voice is all mock-seriousness and pretend threat.

“say what?” she’s too old to dance away from him. he’d once chased her around the office, demanding she give back his lucky pen until she’d taken refuge on top of the desk. if she laughed that hard now she might break a rib, so she merely crosses her arms on the sidewalk and looks up at him, challenging.

“say you like being mrs. spooky.”

“no,” she says simply.

“no?”

“i’m not going to say it.”

“are you sure?” he steps towards her and for a moment she’s sure he’s going to do something ridiculous, and then she rationalizes (no, no he wouldn’t do that), decides they really are too old for this. and then of course he does it anyways. his hands are gentle under the reed basket of her ribs for a moment, calm before the storm, and then he’s moving his fingers over her sides, tickling her in her most sensitive spot until she’s laughing and gasping for air on a d.c. sidewalk, threatening legal action and another bullet to the shoulder if he doesn’t stop. he does, suddenly, and steps even closer to whisper against her ear.

“they think we’re crazy,” he says, nodding to the group of tourists who has stopped to watch the dark-suited, professionals with guns at their hips laugh like college kids on spring break. they’d never guess we’ve watched people die, or that i’ve shot him before, she thinks. they don’t know anything about us. really, she can’t think of a single person who knows anything about her at all aside from the tall man in a black suit who is currently frozen with his hands on her ribs, looking decidedly younger than what his birth certificate would correlate.

“who cares?” she says, “we are,” and kisses him outside the sculpture garden because he’d once taken her here on a spontaneous picnic when their partnership was only a year old, because he’d held her daughter in his arms and the cure for her illness in his palm and because she didn’t really mind that she’d always be mrs. spooky. she kisses him because no one else knows anything about them, not really, and she likes it that way.

**Author's Note:**

> the title of each scene was pulled from and inspired by adele's album "25" in the order in which they appear on the album. they are:  
> 1\. hello  
> 2\. send my love (to your new lover)  
> 3\. i miss you  
> 4\. when we were young  
> 5\. remedy  
> 6\. water under the bridge  
> 7\. river lea  
> 8\. love in the dark  
> 9\. million years ago  
> 10\. all i ask  
> 11\. sweetest devotion
> 
> listening while you read is highly recommended. listening to the album in general is highly recommended, actually.


End file.
